About James Wheeler, a Canadian travel photographer
I’m a Canadian travel photographer based in the Comox Valley. My catalogue is fifteen years deep and began in 2009, when I came home from six years in Asia and bought a DSLR to start taking the work more seriously.
From Ontario to Vancouver Island
I moved from Ontario to Vancouver in 2003 and from there to Taiwan. By 2006 I was based in Shanghai, and over the three years that followed I travelled across fourteen provinces of mainland China while picking up enough Mandarin to get to remote places and have real conversations with the people I met there. It’s also where I met my wife, Junli.
I came back to Canada in 2009 and lived in Vancouver until 2013, then in Pitt Meadows for five years. In 2018 my family and I moved to Courtenay on Vancouver Island, and we’ve been here ever since.
From stock catalogue to fine art prints
Souvenir Pixels grew out of those early Vancouver years as a place to host the photographs people were beginning to ask about and licence. Early on the licence income paid for gear and some travel. For a long time this site ran as a stock catalogue, but stock work was never quite the right home for what I wanted to make. I am a travel photographer who loves shooting landscapes. The images I want to make are the ones that come out of being somewhere on purpose, at the right hour.
Published and licensed worldwide
The catalogue is now more than fifteen years deep, with most of the work from across British Columbia. Tens of thousands of licences have gone to publications and brands around the world, including Lonely Planet, CBS News, The Telegraph, the CBC, and Travel + Leisure. On Pexels alone, the photographs have been viewed more than 1.4 billion times. The prints are where the work belongs now.
Where I photograph on Vancouver Island
Most of my time these days is on Vancouver Island and the BC coast. The Comox Glacier sits on the horizon from most of the east-side beaches, and I’ve photographed it in every season. Tofino is two and a half hours west and I keep going back. Closer to home there’s Goose Spit, Kye Bay, Nymph Falls, Seal Bay, and the harbours and beaches inside the Comox Valley. Most photographs are made early or late in the day, on a Panasonic G9 II or an S1R, and most of them take more than one trip to get right.
I live in Courtenay with Junli and our three kids. We travel together whenever we can and I am creating new images regularly to decorate our home and yours.